World-class review of ballet and dance.
A ballet career necessitates lifelong scholarship. Professionals take a daily technique class that begins with the same pliés at the barre as absolute beginners. Most days at the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet members are tucked into in a corner of the studio, honing their tendus alongside...
PlusJessica Lang is smack in the middle of a three-year stint as resident choreographer at Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet. It’s an excellent artistic match that deserves to be followed closely, because both Lang and PNB merit a higher national profile.
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The close-knit ballet scene in San Diego was dealt a blow when California Ballet, the company Maxine Mahon founded in 1968, folded in 2020. Insiders tell me the pandemic wasn’t entirely to blame, but since then, Golden State Ballet, still wet behind the ears, has risen in its place.
PlusNow in its fifth year, Lincoln Center's “Summer for the City” festival is going all out for dance. This year, the festival will inaugurate the much-anticipated Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival in Alice Tully Hall, featuring five international companies, as well as a new outdoor contemporary dance series called Dance...
PlusIn defiance of the stars overhead, and destiny foretold, Joseph Caley’s Romeo falls, and utterly so, for Grace Carroll’s Juliet, on the opening night of the Australian Ballet’s Melbourne season of John Cranko’s “Romeo and Juliet.”
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A ballet career necessitates lifelong scholarship. Professionals take a daily technique class that begins with the same pliés at the barre as absolute beginners. Most days at the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet members are tucked into in a corner of the studio, honing their tendus alongside the top divisions.
Plus
Jessica Lang is smack in the middle of a three-year stint as resident choreographer at Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet. It’s an excellent artistic match that deserves to be followed closely, because both Lang and PNB merit a higher national profile.
Plus
The close-knit ballet scene in San Diego was dealt a blow when California Ballet, the company Maxine Mahon founded in 1968, folded in 2020. Insiders tell me the pandemic wasn’t entirely to blame, but since then, Golden State Ballet, still wet behind the ears, has risen in its place.
Plus
Now in its fifth year, Lincoln Center's “Summer for the City” festival is going all out for dance. This year, the festival will inaugurate the much-anticipated Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival in Alice Tully Hall, featuring five international companies, as well as a new outdoor contemporary dance series called Dance Encounters, presented outside on Hearst Plaza.
Plus
In defiance of the stars overhead, and destiny foretold, Joseph Caley’s Romeo falls, and utterly so, for Grace Carroll’s Juliet, on the opening night of the Australian Ballet’s Melbourne season...
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It’s hard to think of a company as fresh as Rambert at one hundred years old. The company, founded by icon of British dance Marie Rambert, has prided itself on being the leading contemporary voice within the UK.
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There’s few artists you can truly label as iconoclastic within any discipline, let alone dance, but when discussing Rocio Molina few other labels seem to fit the bill.
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The void will appear soon, we are told, to invite us into an hour-long escape. The pre-show announcement is more poetic than prescriptive: “We are not islands scattered in a melancholy dark sea,” the voice of god adds, and shortly thereafter, the curtain rises on BalletCollective’s latest work, “Translation,” choreographed by founder Troy Schumacher.
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A dancer’s lineage can tell you a lot. The places they’ve trained, the mentors they’ve had, the repertoire they’ve inscribed into their long-term memory all have an impact on the ways that they move, attack a set of steps, strategize a quick petit allegro or a dreamy adagio. So, too, is this true for choreographers.
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“So Are We,” from Sol León and Paul Lightfoot—former spouses who share a long-running creative career—is something of a full-circle event.
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OG Anunoby’s fingertip putback of Jalen Brunson’s Hail Mary three-pointer. Jordan Staal’s diving sniper goal. It’s playoff season, a time of year dominated by unbelievable, high-stakes athleticism across several sports (see also the French Open, the FIFA World Cup).
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Carly Topazio, the founding director of the Rosin Box Project, knows what a challenge it is to stand out amidst San Diego’s many dance companies.
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When is a music video also a dance film? This is a question that I’ve often asked myself as a result of the propensity amongst curators, speakers, museums, arts institutions and more to sort, arrange, label, and otherwise categorize works that contribute to popular arts and culture.
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To launch her tenure as artistic director for the National Ballet of Japan, Miyako Yoshida added Sir Peter Wright’s “Swan Lake” (with Galina Samsova) to the repertoire, explaining the choice as a “new step forward” for the company.
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In the forest, it is never silent. Everything is in transmission with something else, be it tree roots to soil, plants to animals and insects, or warning cries that ripple...
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At the vertical and horizontal intersection of two white lines on a darkened stage, performer Layla Meadows and her corresponding organic outline appears. For this restaging of “Glow,” a work choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek for the Melbourne Festival in 2006, it is Meadows’s time to be scanned and surveyed in this duet between a dancer and a machine.
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With its “sprawl to the wall” density, the city of Los Angeles seems a good fit for democratizing dance, i.e., presenting site-specific movement in an array of venues—both indoors and out—all free to the public. Indeed, Benjamin Millepied, the founder of L.A. Dance Project, began the series in the French capital with his Paris Dance Project in 2024, then called La Ville Dansée, with the idea of exporting it to his adopted city in a co-production.
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In Maia Chao’s “Being Moved,” the audience was ushered up to the 7th floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art in a large, crowded elevator with all sixty or so passengers carrying on conversations at maximum volume.
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They’re saucy, sweet and stunning! They’re the ballerinas of American Contemporary Ballet and they’re helping close the company’s 2025-26 season with performances of “Spectacular Balanchine,” a program devoted to the choreography of George Balanchine.
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Unlike its messy neighbor, Los Angeles, one would think that establishing a ballet company in the relatively serene Orange County would be welcomed.
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